


the devil you know

by jasondont (minigami)



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Canon-Typical Violence, Emetophobia, Gen, M/M, Pre-Slash, no beta we die like etc
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:55:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28138047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/minigami/pseuds/jasondont
Summary: Sometimes it's better the devil you don't know.
Relationships: Darth Maul & CT-7567 | Rex, Darth Maul/CT-7567 | Rex
Comments: 7
Kudos: 48





	the devil you know

**Author's Note:**

> this is kind of weird and extremely self-indulgent and i know it but i had the idea earlier today and it wouldn't leave me alone. 
> 
> i wrote this partly because i made the mistake of watching king arthur: legend of the sword again, and also because i miss my hometown, and summer, and the beach, and i won't be able to go there during the holidays because [gestures at 2020's everything]. hope you like it!

Rex drags himself out of the water and then lies on the sand for a while, his mouth full of saltwater and what’s left of his clothes soaked. The waves hit his legs, dig under soft mud underneath his bare feet, but he’s too tired to move.   
The sky is like a cruel, blue eye, and he blinks the sun from his eyes. He thinks he loses consciousness for a while一or maybe he just falls asleep, too tired after months on the galley, after his long, desperate swim for the shore. His arms hurt, he can’t feel his legs, and every breath is torture, and the saltwater makes the always bleeding blisters on his palms ache, but he falls asleep, half-way out of the water一and for the first time in weeks, he doesn’t dream.

When he wakes up it’s to the caws of half a dozen gulls. Rex opens his eyes, finds them watching him, and knows that if he doesn’t move soon he never will.

And he hasn’t survived three months on a prison ship for nothing, so that’s what he does: he moves. First his legs, and then he rolls onto his stomach, gets his arms and his knees under himself. A wave hits him in the back, and then another一the gulls move away, but not very far. He can see them from the corner of his eye, watching him with their tiny yellow eyes, all hunger and malice.  
“Fuck off,” he tells them. They don’t move, but he stops, shocked by his own voice. “This isn’t your lucky day.”

The birds watch him while he crawls away from the waves, while he struggles to his feet, while he looks around himself.

The sun has gone down quite a bit一that’s the first thing he notices. The sky's still blue, but down east it already looks darker, sea and horizon bleeding into each other. It’s still too warm一his head feels too hot, full of cotton, and it aches; if he doesn’t find some freshwater soon, he’ll find himself in trouble. 

Rex knows he is on an island一he even knew it wasn’t a very big one before he jumped. But he didn’t quite picture how small it is in reality; if he were less tired and better fed, he’d be able to walk around it in less than half an hour. It’s long and so flat he can see all there is to see.  
Unfortunately, it’s not much. 

To the east he can see the ruins of what appears to be an old fortress一an small, half-ruined stone structure, missing its roof and part of its walls. Its old walls peek, golden in the dying sun, over the low shrubs and the cacti that dot the area. The beach around him is full of driftwood, and he can see what once must have been a small boat  
That’s all the wood he’ll find in the small island, he thinks: the only trees he can see are a couple of scrawny palm trees, bent and twisted. The ground around them is full of half-rotten dates, though, and Rex takes one, two steps in their direction, half-mad with exhaustion, hunger, and thirst.

He spits the first one he puts in his mouth一it’s so sour and stringy it makes him gag. He makes himself chew the next one though, and when he swallows he feels it hit his stomach like a rock. It tries to come up once, twice, but Rex clenches his jaws, forces the bile down.

To the west, he can see the remains of what once must have been a small fishing town一half a dozen small houses, built with the same yellow rock that the slowly setting sun is turning golden to his right.  
He wonders how they built them一they must have brought the materials from the mainland.

He really has chosen the worst island in the whole ocean to get stranded in. 

But at least he is free, and if he dies from thirst, from hunger, from the sun’s cruel rays, he’ll have his freedom一so he makes himself walk, up the beach and between the rocks, over the dry algae and between the wasps and the flies that he disturbs with each step.   
It’s still warm enough his clothes dry fast, and he takes off the rag he calls a shirt, tries to clean the still wet sand, wraps it around his head. He wishes for a bath, for fresh water, for fruit. 

When he sees the old fig tree growing in the ruins of one of the first houses, he’s at first sure he’s hallucinating一but no. It’s real. It’s a stunted thing, ugly and twisted, but Rex falls to his knees in front of the low trunk, between the raised roots, paying no heed to the angry wasps that call the tree home.  
The first fig is so sweet he almost throws up again一he tries to pace himself, aware of the fact that they might be too rich for his half-starved body, but he eats until his stomach aches, and then he lies there for a while, half asleep, too full to think .

But he is still thirsty, and that’s what makes him move. He stands up again一the sun’s lower, and the little street where he is is tinted red; to the west, the sky looks like it’s on fire, red and orange and violet all mixed together in violent abandon.   
Rex blinks, shadows his eyes with a sticky hand一and that’s when he sees it, the dark red crosses painted on the walls.

He blinks again, uncomprehending, and then it hits一this is a plague town. Or it must have been一the place appears to have been abandoned for years, for decades, maybe. Rex has been roaming the stretch of land that cradles the small ocean whose waters surround this island, and he is not old, hasn’t lived a long enough life for it to be relevant, but still: he doesn’t remember hearing about any plague in this particular area of the world.

But that’s just his luck一he escaped from the prison ship and found himself here, in this dead island full of empty houses, where the only living things are the seagulls and the wasps. 

“Hello.”

Rex jumps and turns on his heel, his heart in his mouth. 

There is a man on the other side of the street. The setting sun hits his back, and his shadow, black and deep on the pale dirt, touches Rex’s feet. 

“Who are you?” he asks, his voice hoarse. He takes one step back, then another一the man hasn’t moved, has his hands outstretched as if to show he isn’t carrying a weapon, but something about him makes Rex tense up.  
“That’s what I should be asking,” the man says. He has a low, soft voice一he sounds like good leather, like a well-sharpened sword, like furs and velvet and the low rumble of a fast ship.   
Rex frowns.  
“I’m no one,” he replies.   
The man keeps quiet for a beat; then he hums.  
“I’m Maul,” he says. “Would you like some water?”

*

The man who is not a man lives in the old fortress. He takes Rex to the place’s small courtyard and shows him to a seat by the dead fire. There is a well there, and the man lowers his bucket with long, easy movement.   
Despite the heat, he is wearing a long, black cloak, its ragged ends white with dust, its hood up. A pair of yellow eyes shine from its depths, and the arms that lower the bucket are human enough but black and red, the colours swirling around each other.

Rex knows there are many strange and wonderful things in the world一after all, he is one of them. He and his many brothers grew from the mouth of a dragon, and he has met seers who saw the future whether they wanted or not, and white-and-blue-horned hunters, and beasts that walk like men and live twice as long.  
Most of them just want to live一they are not bad or good; they just are, like Rex himself.   
The red and black man that is not a man is something else.

Rex drinks the man’s water. He eats the man’s food. He sits by the man that’s not a man and watches him light his fire and cook fish, and then Rex eats the fish, slowly, trying to savour the white flesh.  
The man that is not a man doesn’t cook his. He guts it with one long, clawed finger, and then picks at what is left while it’s still dripping blood.   
Rex watches and eats and keeps quiet.

“I have fed you and I have invited you to my home,” the man that is not a man says. The sun disappears under the sea, and he lowers his hood一Rex blinks. He watches the red and black face, the crown of horns that grows from his skull, sharp and ragged like the twisted pine trees that grow by the sea on the mainland. “Will you give me your name?”  
Rex shivers. It’s still warm, but the wind is strong, and he feels it on his bare arms, on his feet, on the burnt skin of his face.   
“No,” he replies. “I thank you for your kindness, but you have not earned it.”  
The man chuckles, and Rex tenses up. He scowls. 

“You sprouted from the earth as you are now, less than half-human, and fought and lost your father’s war,” the man that’s not a man says, his soft voice suddenly cruel, “and you say I haven’t earned your name. Do you, boy? Do you even have a name?”

Rex knows fury一he is familiar with its sisters, rage and hate, too, and so he drowns it, strangles it before it has time to get its claws in him.

“Yes,” he repeats, his voice hoarse. “And it’s mine to give.”

It’s the man’s turn to scowl, but the gesture doesn’t last. His yellow eyes flash, and he tilts his head, watches Rex from the other side of the fire.  
“Fascinating,” he says. And then, “would you like some dates?”

*

There is something wrong about the man that is not a man.

He moves easily enough一it’s hard to guess at his age, but he looks both old and young, like whatever he is drifts through time in a way that’s completely unfamiliar to Rex’s tender human bones. But sometimes he flinches, he twitches, and then he rubs at his wrists, at his waist, at his neck.   
Rex eats the man’s dates and watches him, and the way his eyes shine yellow in the dark, and the dance of light over red and black skin, and the man’s crown of horns, and then一  
“You’ve been marked,” he says. He sounds more like himself than he has since he was betrayed and shackled down and thrown into that hell of a ship. He feels more like himself, and that’s how he knows: “You’ve been sealed. You can’t leave.”  
The man that’s not a man stares at him for a beat, and then smiles, and laughs, that silky-smooth voice of his trying to find its way into Rex’s head.  
“Very good,” he says. “Very good, dragon child.”  
Rex leans an elbow on a folded knee and stares at him.  
“What do you want from me?” he asks.

The man raises his arms, and his cloak slips down, reveals the marks around his wrists, so deep and so vicious they still bleed and Rex can see a flash of white bone. 

“I want out of here,” he replies, “the same as you. What do you want?”  
“I want out of here,” Rex repeats. He lowers his eyes and then blinks up at him. “I want…”

Revenge. To go home. To see my brothers again.

“I want my armour back,” Rex says.  
The man that’s not a man hums. He nods, tilts his head, watches Rex with unblinking eyes for a beat.

“What’s your name?” he asks again, and Rex opens his mouth, closes it again with a click, and then sighs. He looks over the man, over Maul’s shoulder, to the dark sea he knows is beyond, even if he can’t see it.  
“My name is Rex,” he says, and Maul shivers, smiles wide and sharp in the darkness.

Something dark and cold finds its home in Rex’s chest, and he sighs, rubs at the skin over his heart.

“Freedom. My armour,” he says. He doesn’t look at the man that’s not a man, but he can feel his glee, like tar, or good wine, or maybe liquid fire in his veins. “And then what?”  
The man laughs.  
“Whatever we want, captain,” he says. “Whatever we want.”

**Author's Note:**

> the island actually exists (more or less). it's called tabarca and it's one of my favourite places in the world.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [like a broken king](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28944432) by [svartalfheimr](https://archiveofourown.org/users/svartalfheimr/pseuds/svartalfheimr)




End file.
